When Fate Intervenes
by Azpidistra
Summary: To cross planes twice, to meet the same alternate reality twice in one lifetime is impossible. (Ideas stemmed from the works of SouthernChickie)


Disclaimer: Greg Masters and Julie Kregson belong to SouthernChickie. I have borrowed them with her permission. The idea that Greg Masters and Duncan MacLeod confront one another is pure speculation on my part, and in no way represent the intentions of the author.  
  
Author's Note: Technically, this story is a sequel to my earlier work 'When Universes Collide', however it can stand on its own. While she was not the first author to write of it, I borrowed the tesseract theory from Madeline L'Engle. In regards to any confusion, I would gladly explain what I can. If the confusion is in regards to the characters, I suggest you read the works of SouthernChickie. Enjoy.  
  
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There are five dimensions to space. In the first dimension, there is a line, the quickest path from one point to the next. In the second dimension, there is a square, with its four points and its four lines. In the third dimension, there is a box, a three-dimensional square. Individually, these first three dimensions represent length, height, width, and volume. But the fourth dimension, the fourth dimension, is more complicated. The fourth dimension is time. The fifth dimension is legend, a myth, a scientific explanation not yet explained.  
  
The fifth dimension is the act of traveling through time and space itself.  
  
If someone had traveled across time planes before, across the blurred lines of alternate universes, it is unlikely they would do so again. A first visit is rare, but a second visit is impossible. But Julie Kregson had never forgot that first visit.  
  
In the second year of her sentence, she had been transferred to a women's prison in Old Lyme, Connecticut. She wrote Greg every week, complaining of the prison food, talking of her cellmate (a woman named Beth Carpenter, who was in for murder, and only slightly schizophrenic -she claimed not to hear voices, but to hear songs), and of the floor matron, who was loud, brash, and very over-bearing. Only once, did she mention that first (and only) time they had met, in the Seacouver grocery store. Greg never wrote back.  
  
Julie was undeterred. Every week, when the outgoing mail left, there was a letter addressed to Greg Masters. She had no one else to write to. Her husband had divorced her from pure loathing, Rylan no longer needed her, Brad had custody of their two children, and made sure they never saw their mother. And, of her older children, the twins had come once, only to tell her off, and Kevin was still deployed oversees. She had no one else. And every week, when the incoming mail arrived, and the matron walked the rows, calling names, waving letters, Julie silently pleaded for her name to be called.  
  
But it never was.  
  
Six years into her sentence, Julie escaped. In the daily outing visiting the outdoor prison grounds, she declined an offer to play tennis, and jumped over the electric fence when the guards had turned away. The prison was built on a major Connecticut route, and she ran blindly, no clue to where she was going. She only ran, with only an old denim jacket to help hide the prison uniform.  
  
No one wanted to take a hitchhiker, or no wanted to take an escaped convict hitchhiker. But soon it started to rain, soaking Julie Kregson to the bone, and desperate, she seeked shelter in a tiny roadside 24-hour diner. She realized, still not knowing exactly where she was, that she was no longer in the prison town.  
  
Something about the waitress looked familiar. But Julie no longer remembered as many key points or faces, and she let the flat, indifferent eyes and norwestern-lilted accent fade into oblivion. She ordered her coffee, and her pie, and when the waitress set the plate on the table, Julie remembered having that same pie six, seven years before.  
  
She drank the coffee, thankful to taste real, honest coffee again, thankful it was hot. She asked for a refill. The same waitress poured it. She finished the second cup before the waitress had a chance to walk away, and signaled for more. The waitress smiled ghostly.  
  
"Do I know you?" Julie asked tentively. Prison had subdued her.  
  
"Oh, honey, I can't remember all the faces I see pop in and out of here daily. Too many of them."  
  
"No, this would have been somewhere else. Somewhere west."  
  
The waitress looked quizzical. She rubbed one hand along her chin, and flicked a strand of graying hair behind her right ear. She smiled widely. "Sure, I worked briefly in Seacouver, Washington. Lovely part of the state. At this place called Rebecca's Café."  
  
Julie paled, and reached out a hand to grab the waitress' elbow. The waitress did not flinch, nor did she pull away. "You mean, that restaurant really did exist?"  
  
"Well, sure, it existed, sweetheart." She cocked her head to one side. "You mean to tell me it doesn't in your universe?"  
  
"No, I don't suppose it does," mumbled Julie, but the waitress had already walked away, talking now to a man at the adjoining table.  
  
Silently, she finished her coffee, and she finished her pie. When the waitress offered her more, Julie politely declined, shaking her head. She asked for the bill.  
  
"Oh, don't you worry about it. On the house tonight. Hope you have some place dry to go for tonight. Doesn't look like this rain will be letting up anytime soon."  
  
"Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks."  
  
She stood on the edge of the parking lot for several moments, watching the cars stream by, not bothering to attempt to hitchhike again. She already knew it would be impossible to bum a ride. She hoped, that somehow, the waitress would understand why she did not leave a tip, that she had no money to call her own, and had the coffee and pie not been free, she would have had to do dish duty to pay. She sighed, lit a cigarette, taking a few drags, before the end sputtered dead in the cold raindrops. Already she was soaked through again. Dully, she lit the cigarette again, barely caring when it sputtered out again.  
  
"It might help if you had some sort of protection against you and the rain," suggested a male voice, coming to stand over her, shielding her from the raindrops, and from the cold with his black umbrella.  
  
"Thanks," she duly responded. "Got a light?"  
  
"Sure, do. Didn't know you smoked, Julie Kregson." He pulled the lighter from his pocket, lighting a new cigarette for her, to the sound of a grateful sigh.  
  
"How do you know my nam--?" She looked up to face the man, and she lost her voice. She recognized those eyes, currently laughing at her. She recognized that face, that same disarming, charming smile, that same Southern Missouri accent. She frowned, and she turned away.  
  
"Not even a thank you for the light?"  
  
Julie shrugged. "You don't deserve one."  
  
"Why don't I?"  
  
"I wrote you. . . every week, I wrote you a new letter, and you never wrote back."  
  
"I never received a letter from you, Julie. I swear. You know I would have written back." He paused, stared out into the rain. "How many did you write?"  
  
"One for every week I was locked away. You do the math."  
  
"What was the reason?"  
  
"Rylan." Julie's voice was devoid of any emotion. She took another drag on the secret.  
  
"You killed her then?"  
  
"No. My ex-husband stepped in before I succeeded in that. I do have a small victory though. Apparently, she died about a year, two years ago. Horsing accident."  
  
"Well, congrats."  
  
"Thanks." She took a last drag of the cigarette, crushing the end between the pavement and her foot. She looked Greg Masters straight in the eye gain, unflinching, and she smiled. "You look exactly the same."  
  
"And, you, Julie, look harder. It fits you," he added after a long pause.  
  
His lips were exactly as she remembered.  
  
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She had followed him to his hotel room. He had rented a car, and in the ride there, he explained he was in town, meeting some old friends at the local casino. The pride in his voice was evident when he explained he had won every poker game he had played. Of course, he explained with a wry grin, he had been cheating.  
  
Once in the hotel room, Julie had showered, standing under the water until the bathroom mirrors had fogged, and the hot water had turned icy. She wrapped herself in a hotel bathrobe, and toweled and finger-dried her hair before she stepped again into the hotel bedroom. Greg was watching a basketball game on TV. She sat next to him.  
  
"My son played basketball. In college. He was good too."  
  
"Your Richie?"  
  
"Yeah," he smiled at the double meaning of her words, "my Richie."  
  
"What happened to him, with him?"  
  
"I was discovered." He paused to lower the television volume. "I lost it, extended my hand too far, and I was caught. By MacLeod."  
  
"What happened then?"  
  
"I don't know. I don't remember if he won or if I won."  
  
"Won what?"  
  
"Our fight for Richie."  
  
He looked out the window, past the faded yellow wallpaper, and the muted game, past the heavy red velvet curtain and matching bedspreads, past the pain and the past he could not remember, and Julie took his hand into hers, offering no words. For a long time, they sat there, saying nothing.  
  
Greg kissed her first, but she removed the first item of clothing: his sweater. Quickly, they were involved in the oldest game, but this game held no tenderness; this game was raw, and had no rules. This game hurt.  
  
When finally, they found themselves still tangled amongst one another and amongst the hotel bed sheets, Greg found his voice to speak. "I think I both won and lost."  
  
"How is that possible?"  
  
"If the world has any sense of chivalry, any sense of fair play, I would have lost. Richie saw Duncan MacLeod as the good guy. I mean, I kidnapped him. You can't do much to redeem yourself in your kid's eyes after he learns that. And, we both know, that good always triumphs over evil. But yet, here I am, with you."  
  
"So, you think we may have somehow crossed planes again? That in some universe, you did lose, and you are now dead, but yet here, in this one, you killed Duncan?"  
  
"You have a better explanation?"  
  
"No," Julie shrugged. "But I just think. . ."  
  
"What?"  
  
"To cross planes twice, to meet the same alternate reality twice in one lifetime is impossible."  
  
"No, not impossible. Just improbable."  
  
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In Robert Heinlein's novel *And He Built a Crooked House*, he described a house built as a net of the unfolding of the cells into three-dimensional space, of a tesseract, and when it collapsed, it became a real hyperdimensional tesseract. In Madeline L'Engle's novel *A Wrinkle in Time*, she wrote the tesseract as a doorway, in which a person could pass through and emerge at another point far away from the starting point, as if the two distant points were brought together at one intersection (at the tesseract doorway) by the folding of space, enabling near-instantaneous transportation. In Alex Garland's novel *The Tesseract*, he used the term to mean the three-dimensional net of the four-dimensional hypercube rather than the hypercube itself.  
  
In mathematical terms, a tesseract is a hybercube, a cube cubed. It is four-dimensional, and has eight cubical cells. In science-fiction, a tesseract is a time machine, the quickest way to travel between point A and point B. A tesseract both saves time, and it is time.  
  
A tesseract is the fifth dimension. A tesseract can very well be a link between one dimension, between one alternate universe and another.  
  
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"So, where do we go from here?" Julie asked. For several long moments, the minutes extending to hours, they had remained quiet, in futile attempts to sleep.  
  
"I don't if there is another here to go to. Wherever we are, it is up to it, some force, as to when we can leave."  
  
"We chose to leave last time."  
  
"Did we? I think, that just as I probably dead in my home universe, you must still be in prison in yours. But somehow, the two wires crossed again, bringing us both here, while still leaving us there."  
  
"So, your saying we are in two places at once?"  
  
"If not more than two. We make a lot of decisions in one day, Jules."  
  
"Don't call me, Jules," she scolded. "My mother used to call me that."  
  
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Time travel is nothing new. Nineteenth century author, Jules Verne wrote a novel on the concept. Physics has its own theory.  
  
Between two identical watches, if one was to remain on Earth, and the other was released into space, if compared at a later date, the watch released into space would show a slower time than the Earth-bound watch. This is due to gravity.  
  
If a human-manned space ship was to approach a black hole at the precise angle, and able to enter and exit (again at the precise angle), the spaceship could in theory, return to Earth hundreds or thousands of years into the future, while barely a moment had passed for the passengers.  
  
If a human-manned spaceship was able to travel faster than light, they could perhaps move between time periods, in both directions, visiting both the future and the past.  
  
But time travel theories say nothing of traveling between universes.  
  
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Julie rose first. Her hair had tangled again during the night, and a light sheen of sweat covered her body. She had no clothes but the prison uniform, and not wanting to wear that again, she borrowed pants and a shirt from Greg.  
  
Here, they were like old lovers, and maybe, here, they were old lovers.  
  
She was gone before he awoke, sitting in the hotel restaurant, sipping some coffee, chain-smoking her third cigarette, a plate of untouched scrambled eggs and sausages before her. It was there, just like that, that Greg Masters found her. He called the waitress over, ordered his own coffee and breakfast, and lit his own cigarette. He took a long drag, inhaling the smoke before he exhaled.  
  
"When did you start?" Julie asked.  
  
"Hu?"  
  
"When did you start smoking?"  
  
"Recently, I guess. Picked up the habit again after this fight Richie and I had his junior year of college. Quit again not long after. Started again after, after Duncan and I fought, I suppose."  
  
"So, you only smoke in this universe?"  
  
"Hard to smoke in a universe when you're dead," Greg replied, and he shrugged, thanking the waitress for the coffee and food. "When did you start?"  
  
"In prison. It was a habit to pass the time." She too shrugged. "Do you think fate intervenes?"  
  
"How?"  
  
"I don't know. Just, us meeting again."  
  
"Maybe. Do you?"  
  
"Maybe."  
  
Julie stomped the cigarette out in the full ashtray. Greg followed suit. They ate in silence.  
  
"I think maybe we are a staple, somehow."  
  
"A staple?"  
  
"Yah. In every alternate universe, there are certain elements, which remain the same."  
  
"You've researched."  
  
"You have time in prison," Julie shrugged. She lit another cigarette.  
  
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For a week, they stayed. Together, they fell into a routine. They breakfasted together every morning, complete with minimal conversation, made use of the hotel facilities during the day. When in the late afternoon or early evening, when Greg met with his buddies to gamble, Julie wandered the casino, sometimes catching a show (live or screen), doing some shopping with the money Greg continued to win, people watching, or staying in the room, ordering movies from pay-per-view. They ate dinner late, always ordering room service, and satisfied their longings both they slept.  
  
They still held no tenderness towards one another, but the rawness had lessened into passion, and the passion had blossomed into the occasion gesture of gentleness.  
  
Neither complained. Both spoke very little. And, when they did speak, they made little mention of the last time they had met.  
  
It was only when the week ended, in bed watching a movie, Greg's arm wrapped around Julie's waist, her head against his chest, did she dare to speak.  
  
"They're looking for me, the authorities."  
  
"I know."  
  
"Think they'll find me?"  
  
He took a long time to answer, and briefly, Julie wondered if he would answer, if perhaps he had not fallen asleep, lost in thought. "Here, yes. Somewhere else, no."  
  
Julie knew he did not refer to the location. "Maybe we could leave first."  
  
"Impossible. We don't how to do it."  
  
"We could try."  
  
"No. Too risky. A tesseract is a dangerous game."  
  
"Love is a dangerous game too, but we play that."  
  
She felt his arm tighten around her. "So, we do. So we do."  
  
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When Greg woke the next morning, he found Julie gone. In her place, were the clothes she had borrowed from him, and all the purchases she had bought with his money in those nights he had gambled. There was also a note.  
  
'Greg, some believe that a tesseract can be used as a jumping-off point, that if you can find the right angle, the right entrance, the right exit, you can use it as a link between one world and another. You said this yourself, but you also said it was a dangerous game. I know this, but I still have to take that chance. I don't know if I will survive the encounter, and I don't know where I will end up if I do. But I still had to try. Last time we met, you told me an alternate universe formed for every decision we made, and for every decision we had not made. I chose to escape, and this is the result. Maybe somewhere, I am still there simply writing you letters, but I don't know how to find out, nor do I want to find out. I had forgot how sweet freedom tasted. I hope we meet again, somewhere, somehow. I love you. Julie.'  
  
Greg folded the note again, sighing, staring out the window. It had finally stopped raining. He was due to leave the hotel, to leave the casino today. He rolled over, and he fell back asleep. 


End file.
